Our journey- from 8 week old pup, to agility dog, school dog, and trickster. Training thoughts, tips and lots of problem solving, photography and general musings on owning a silly and serious paradoxical Aussie Shepherd.

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RC session

Some observations from today’s RC session, keeping in mind it was our first time training at school- a highly familiar environment but not associated at all with training, with a HIGH level of distraction- unfamiliar kids on the playground, dogs on the other oval, football being played, etc. I wanted to do some exits to a tyre as I realised that all her leaps in competitions had been when the tyre was the next obstacle. I also wanted to test my theory that she is worried by the edge of the DW on the up ramp.

It was a mixed session with some brilliant hits and running and some odd striding. I think that some of the odd striding came from getting on the up-ramp, as certainly each run with the carpet on the up-ramp and going up hill was much smoother than going down the hill (toward the tunnel). I also need to remember that if I do a pull or a push exit, that the next FEW exits must be straight or she starts overthinking and adjusts every single stride and it gets very messy. So must do a few straight, one curve, then a few straight. You can’t necessarily see her anxiety too well when approaching the dogwalk when the video is in normal speed, but there’s certainly a couple of examples where she shortens her stride before getting on it on the non-carpet end.

I’m happy with the session though but I can tell she’s working through a lot of stuff with the DW right now and I’d really like to get her to a place where she can run it with consistent stride-lengths and one adjustment if needed, rather than in some of these goes where she’s adjusting at least 2 or 3 times.

Edited to add:

I just love my girl’s separation. I never thought I’d get so excited about my dog’s ability to separate its back legs, but there ya go.

Maybe it’s hard to tell but here’s a grab from the video on approaching the DW- she’s added an extra stride in order to not ‘run onto’ the walk…

And here you can see she’s more ‘jumping on’ than running on, based on rear-feet positioning. Definitely something going on here.